One of novelist Stephen Crane's most admired versanelles, "The Wayfarer," makes a profound statement about how rarely the path to "truth" is traveled.
Stephen Crane is most widely noted for his important Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage; however, his little series of poems that appeared in Edmund Clarence Stedman’s An American Anthology demonstrates a useful form that poets rarely engage; it is a form called the versanelle.
A versanelle is usually quite short, twelve lines or fewer, and gathers to an enigmatic punch line that implies an observation about human behavior. It often describes a scene as it tells a very short tale, sometimes quite mysterious and tantalizing. It may use ordinary poetic devices such as metaphor, personification, metonymy, and simile, or it may simply rely on other colorful language.
In Crane’s widely anthologized “The Wayfarer,” the speaker narrates a little ditty about a traveler who sets out down the “pathway to truth.” The traveler is immediately “struck with astonishment” that the pathway is overgrown with weeds.
So the traveler remarks that obviously nobody had traveled down this path for quite some time. Then he notices that each weed is actually “a singular knife.” It is at this point that the traveler decides he will also abandon this pathway to truth and look for another road.
Of course, the implication is that like all the others who have tried and then abandoned the way to truth, this traveler will not get to truth either, because he would rather travel an easier path.
“The Violets”
In “The Violets,” the speaker relates a tale that accounts for there being no violets growing in a certain land. A traveler asks the locals, why there are no violets in the vicinity, and they responded that there used to be violets growing there but once upon a time the violets made the announcement that “Until some woman freely gives her lover / To another woman / We will fight in bloody scuffle.”
The locals were sad but concluded, “There are no violets here.” That, of course, indicated that the violets engaged in battle and fought until the last violet was dead, and thus no more could be produced. Clearly, not all of Crane’s versanelles can be judged a total successful.
“’Scaped”
The speaker says that he used to know a “fine song.” He interjects to demand that the listener believe him, because “It is true.” He continues, “It was all of birds.” He kept them “in a basket, and surprisingly, when he opened the basket door, all the birds flew away.
He demanded of them, “Come back, Little Thoughts!” But of course, they just “laughed” at him and continued on their flight. Then they suddenly transformed into “sand / Thrown between me and the sky.”
Instead of protecting the “fine song” that might have lived in perpetuity in his wonderful mind, he let the grace notes escape, and they devolved into meaninglessness.
